I was thinking about how popular Pet battles have become, and wondered what Blizzard had in mind for the future. Eventually people will have all the pets they want, have completed the quest and will be left with little incentive to keep playing.

What you guys like to see in the future with Pet Battles ? Thoughts, ideas ?

Blizz has recently stated that they are thinking about adding the possibility to earn those silver coins when fighting pet battles (instead of having to do dailies to get them). In addition, if you are below lvl 90, you will earn xp on your character eaqual to killing a yellow mob.

Other than that, you get to have fun doing PVP battles where you tailor a lot of different teams with synergies.

On the horizon, we will get more pets to collect (although probably not as many new ones as 5.1 gave us), enable us to upgrade our pets to epic quality (good lord, we would have to aquire a LOT of battle stones for this, and we would probably lose 2 levels when upgrading our current lvl 25 rare pets to epic quality). That should give us something to do .

Blizzard also considers adding "boss" pets in the wild, where you use your whole team to kill one powerhouse pet. Only issue I have about this is that the "boss" pets probably would be heavily camped, and on PVP servers it would be like fighting for the chest in an arena; interrupted from being attacked all of the time. If I have to camp for hours to get to do a boss pet battle, I'm out. Likewise if I can get attacked while battling it, pulling me out of the battle and the pet dying from some AOE during the ensuing PVP battle.

If you look at the pet battle GUI, it is separated into two sections, divided by a "bar". The buttons are 3 pet skills, pet switch, capture and forfeit. There are room for two additional buttons on the far right. Whenever I see something like that, I immediately think that Blizzard has implemented it for future use. Perhaps they will add consumables to pet battles like health / dodge / dmg-potions (hope not - that would make them mandatory). Or perhaps they will open up for leveling past lvl 25, giving the pets additional abilities. Who knows...

It's not long before I don't really need any more soulbound pet battle stones. After that, I only need to do PVE battles to level pets (which you also can do through PVP, which has been buffed xp-wise). The rewards for PVE battling are too low to bother doing that, which means PVP is the way to go. PVP doesn't really give much either, other than having some fun with your teams. Would probably become tired of this after a short while. I'm not too interested in the silver coins, but if I received valor points from PVE battles (such as pet battle dailies in the least), and conquest points from doing PVP-battles, I could at least upgrade my character's items as a bonus.

I think that Blizzard are going to get a shock in the next month or so when they check the stats on pet collecting and battling, as I'm starting to notice more and more people taking notice of it. Especially since most raiding guilds (ourselves included) are now on break until January.

When I started, it was just me who was interested. Now there are two others in guild that are catching me like a train. My padawan Monikay started off about two weeks or so ago, and is already at number 8 for our server, and one of our raid tanks (Dyna) went from 250 points on Wowprogress to 2.5k in two days, and is now in the top 60.

And when I check the profiles for our server I see more and more new names and updated profiles. Happy times.

As for future, there looks like quite a lot in the pipeline, but I hope that Blizzard don't go Epic crazy. In my opinion you shouldn't have more than 20 or so in total over a few months, and Legendary pets should be like one or two per person at most, and very hard to get.

The pet boss idea sounds interesting, although I agree with the camping worries. I've also heard suggestions about an actual pet instance, which could be a laugh. And I suspect that they'll also run a second wave of raid drop pets at some point, from the likes of BWD, ICC, etc. so that'll keep us busy.

I think the next natural extension of random PvP would be an in-game tournament structure, although I think that they may baulk at that initially. It would need a whole new system of it's own, and would certainly need to be cross server, but in reality it could see a huge boost to pet battles in the long term.

And I do think we should have a Halfhill type place for our pets. I wanna stable!!!

-- fix the bugs-- balance is actually very good for such a new system, but they have to fix Supercharge/Prowl-- after they've done this, they need to add rewards for pet battle PvP. Currently all you get is XP, which is not enough. Queues are becoming too long, and fighting tamers is boring. If they want people to stay engaged, there needs to be a PvP metagame for people to talk about, and rewards that people are motivated to go after.

The PvE additions they've alluded to are pretty exciting, and I hope those are implemented in a sane way so that the challenge is beating the pet boss (as opposed to camping server restarts and right clicking the mob before the other 10 people camping him, which is the current 'challenge'). The spirit tamers were very well done, the only problem is that they give up their rewards very quickly -- many people are done with this already. Same goes for the 'raiding with leashes' pets, most people who care about them already have them. Putting these in instances removed the frustration of spawn camping, which was great. They just need to stretch this kind of content a bit more. Lowering drop rates would be the unappealing way to do this; adding additional challenge in terms of pet battle mechanics would be really great. If they can do that, I think the system will remain engaging for quite a while.

I think and I hope they will copy some of the amazing stuff that is in the pokemon games.

Item holding, here we are talking about xp share, leftovers, the items that improve ur attack/speed/hp, ur dmg from special attacks etc. Im not too sure about potions etc as we dont really need it in this game.

Breeding of couse! We know the code is already there and wouldnt it be sweet to have flayer youngling breed 14 and flayer youngling breed 3 make a mini flayer youngling breed 5/15.

Epic/legendary pets, stones were datamined for epic pets but im not too sure how I feel about this one. At some point I hope to have 500 rare pets all of good breeds and if they suddenly release epic stones im not sure wtf I will do.

Battletower (one can only dream) where you fight randomized trainers with pets of rare quality (epic/legendary would be too hard for 3 pets to deal with).

I would love to see the ability to pet battle via a mobile app. Headed away for a week for the holidays, and it's not a big deal that I won't have WoW access, but I will have a LOT of downtime, with wifi access, that I could use to level pets if an app were available for my Android phone or Kindle Fire.